The right way to ensure the Availability of SAP environments starts with Veeam

When it comes to ensuring the Availability of SAP environments, enterprises need to ensure their expectations are met. Recently, I collaborated with a few of my peers and experts in the industry to provide detailed, technical information on ensuring the Availability of SAP environments with Veeam. If you have SAP, it’s an important part of your business, and ensuring its Availability goes without saying.

There are a number of key points covered in the mentioned paper, so I encourage you to have a look. Note that there are a few things to consider with SAP environments; mainly the SAP-specific tools (BRTools) such as BRRestore, BRBackup and BRArchive. The Veeam SAP whitepaper has a number of scripts you can use with BRBackup so you can provide additional application Availability. Many SAP environments that use Veeam may have a data flow much like the image below:

The BRTools provide a good data flow for application-specific data (from the database), but there are a number of extra considerations. For example, there are questions about the need for an image-based backup of the SAP environment, and many organizations have struggled with the decision to virtualize SAP.

The Veeam SAP whitepaper is an outstanding read to explore some additional capabilities that you may not even know you had when it comes to using Veeam Availability Suite for SAP environments. Simply virtualizing SAP is a difficult enough decision, however, by doing so there are some very compelling Veeam-specific capabilities that many organizations would indeed benefit greatly from.

The first example is leveraging the Veeam On-Demand Sandbox for SAP environments. This is particularly important when it comes to testing critical updates to SAP environments and any downstream systems that may have special communication or custom applications that critically depend on SAP. Take into consideration that Veeam now has three different ways in which you can run the On-Demand Sandbox: from a backup file, from a replicated VMware VM and from a storage snapshot of a supported array for Veeam storage integration. The other half of this technology is the ability to verify that image-based backups of the SAP system are indeed recoverable. Note that the paper also shows how to leverage scripts in the SureBackup area of Veeam Backup & Replication.

The ability to leverage the data of an SAP environment in a risk-free situation (the virtual lab) is an incredible capability many enterprises simply do not have. This can save wasted time on change control situations that are backed out or not properly tested ahead of time.

Also consider the Instant VM Recovery capability for SAP environments. This technology provides an outstanding, high-speed recovery technique should an SAP environment have a failure that requires a complete restore.

In addition to the entire system options above, the Veeam SAP paper talks at length about a number of Oracle database situations, as well as provide example walkthrough situations of restoring SAP databases with Veeam Explorer for Oracle. This is in addition to the walkthrough provided using BRRestore from the BRTools kit. If you are using HANA or SQL Server, there is further content for these databases as well in the Veeam SAP paper.

When it comes to Availability for SAP environments, it’s critical to have the best tools at your arsenal to avoid outages, ensure workloads are running as expected and have rich options when things don’t go as planned. Download the Veeam SAP whitepaper to learn more.